Overcoming The Poverty Cycle

Teach Black Men The Value Of Supporting Their Families

June 11, 1989|By CHARLES CLARY

The image of the underclass in the United States has become all too clear: A family headed by a woman with two or three young children living in a government-subsidized housing complex. The woman cannot work because she must stay at home to care for her young children. The father is just not around. The family receives food stamps and aid for the dependent children.

The best way to improve the plight of the underclass continues to be the subject of heated debate among social scientists, legislators and journalists. It seems the questions that arise from the debate too often outnumber the solutions.

However, a solution proposed in a recent seminar at Hampton University offers some new-found encouragement. Ron Mincy, an economist for the Urban Institute of Washington, suggested the key to improving the plight of the underclass is to eliminate the joblessness of the black male. Related to this approach is the restoration of the values held by the black male.

Mincy's suggestion was made during a seminar on the impact of public policy on the underclass; the seminar was sponsored by black journalists.

MINCY'S FOCUS on the black male is based on the fact that nearly two-thirds of the underclass, as he defines it, is black.

After a two-year study, Mincy concluded that the underclass consists of concentrations of people primarily from urban areas who live in neighborhoods where "dysfunctional behavior" is common. Such neighborhoods have more than the national average of:

* Teen-agers who are high school dropouts.

* Unemployed working-age males.

* Households receiving welfare.

* Households headed by women. Three of every five households in the underclass are headed by women.

Although Mincy makes no mention of poverty in his definition of underclass, the statistics for the underclass and for those living in poverty are similar. One of every three blacks is living in poverty, while one of 10 whites is living in poverty. Three of every four black families living in poverty are single-parent households headed by females.

Whether one looks at the underclass data or the poverty statistics, it is clear that although the plight of the underclass is not just a black problem, wiping out black poverty clearly would be a major step toward easing the plight of the underclass as a whole.

Although Mincy's conclusion about the crux of the underclass problem is on target, his list of underclass criteria seems incomplete. I would include racial and criminal isolation on the list. These are somewhat inherent in the other behaviors listed, but clearly the population of the underclass is much greater when these specific behaviors are added.

The root cause of this dysfunctional behavior is men. Men are largely responsible for the creation of female-headed families, who turn to welfare. The children in many of those families become dropouts.

Whatever steps are taken to cure the problem of the underclass, they include preparing men to get a firm foothold in the labor market.

The large proportion of black families headed by females is no coincidence, Mincy says. They are created because black males do not participate financially or morally in the household. While a conclusion cannot be made about all black men or confined only to black men, there is little doubt that this circumstance is a contributing factor to the size of the underclass.

THE MOST DEVASTATING factor at work here is economics. The Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank borne out of the war on poverty waged during the 1960s, reports that the vast majority of people in the underclass are in urban areas, where a restructuring of the economy has taken place. In those areas, particularly in the North east, manufacturing facilities have closed down and been replaced with service-oriented businesses.

The black male has been the major casualty of this economic change which manifests itself in unemployment of the black male. Unemployment gives the black male a reason to abandon his financial commitment to support the family.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the disproportionately high unemployment rate of black males. A major cause is racial discrimination, which has kept the door to employment opportunity shut for generations. When affirmative action practices helped pry open that door, blacks entered. But when the recession hit in the 1970s, a tide of layoffs followed, and a disproportionately high percentage of blacks, by virtue of being on the last rung of the seniority ladder, found themselves unemployed.

While racial discrimination is an indirect cause of being displaced in the labor market, other factors had more direct roles. Some blacks missed their opportunity because they chose to drop out of school, making them unprepared for new employment. They resorted to unemployment pay, welfare or crime.